A decisive body of work started to slip away from the Avalanche with the slightest hesitation.
Sam Malinski — of course it was Malinski, the replacement for an injured Cale Makar on Colorado’s top defensive pairing — eyed a loose puck in the offensive zone. He could have charged the right circle, could have made an aggressive play on the puck. For barely an instant, he appeared to have the advantage in a potential footrace to it.
He skidded to a stop instead, then wheeled around, trying not to lose a step the other direction.
“It looks like we’re gonna get to it,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said later. “We don’t get to it. They get to it. And that’s how the rush starts to develop.”
Ivan Barbashev carried the puck out of his defensive zone, and seven seconds later, it was in Colorado’s net. For the first time in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Avs’ mortality was staring them in the face. Two minutes later, their dream season was on life support.
With two goals in 127 seconds, the Vegas Golden Knights upended the Western Conference Final and left Ball Arena in stunned silence Friday night. The first one leveled the score with 10:45 remaining in the third period of Game 2. The second gave Vegas a 2-1 edge and eventually a 2-0 series lead.
“We felt really good about our game,” captain Gabriel Landeskog said, “and then a short little lapse for two minutes, and they scored two goals.”
Bednar didn’t feel like his team played poorly in a second consecutive home loss. But the hardly perceivable details, the miniscule mistakes piled up to cost Colorado a game that meant everything. There were the opportunities to score an insurance goal before Vegas broke through, the two power plays with a 1-0 lead. And then there were the moments that sparked both Golden Knights goals.
Malinski’s brief hesitation resulted in a 3-on-2 rush for Vegas, with the young defenseman skating for his life to take away an angle from Barbashev. The Avs were scrambling to get back and cover every threat. The puck drifted across to Jack Eichel, who snapped a shot off the far post and into the net before Devon Toews could close in on him — a shot that Knights goalie Carter Hart “saw him working on this morning.”
“Two net drivers (were on the rush),” Avalanche goalie Scott Wedgewood said. “Read that first. (Eichel) kind of stalled. … Just over the pad and the arm, post and in. Perfect shot, but not a perfect goal. Back (side) pressure and feeling that maybe kept me a little bit too much (on the) strong side, and he toe-dragged it. One you want back.”
“We get back in time,” Bednar lamented, “but we don’t close it out.”
The Avs couldn’t manufacture any momentum in the offensive zone as they tried to pull themselves together. So often this season, a lead was definitive. All of a sudden, a tie meant doubt.
“Definitely think it stung,” winger Logan O’Connor said. “Try and be a mature group about it. Try and get right back to our game-plan. I think after the first one, we didn’t do that quick enough. And then the second one happens. And that’s on us to make a better adjustment there and sort of forget about what has happened and move past it. That’s something we can learn from.”
Much like how the first goal stemmed from Colorado’s failure to maintain the zone, the second arose from a botched opportunity to enter it. Valeri Nichushkin was past center-ice when the puck was poked away from him from behind, handing Vegas possession — a moment of weakness for a power forward whose every move is made with conviction, usually.
Then in the defensive zone, Avalanche teammates Toews and Brock Nelson got tangled up along the boards as Toews tried to clear the puck. The attempt was blocked. It took a deflection toward the middle of the ice, where Eichel passed to Barbashev for a one-timer. Both goals rang the post on their way in.
“Some of it is doing the right thing but not hard enough. Some of it is, there’s decisions there, too. Like, Val easily had time to put that puck in,” Bednar said. “And I don’t want to just single out Val, but that was a goal, right? And then we have it back a couple more times — we don’t get it out (of our zone). So we don’t get it in. We don’t get it out.”
“I think our puck decisions lacked some maturity at times,” O’Connor said. “And therefore we deviated from the game plan that had given us some success throughout the game.”
Whatever it was that abandoned the Avs — maturity, decisiveness, discipline — the price to pay was a season on the brink. After 127 seconds of whiplash, they have a two hours of flight time to Vegas to regain their bearings.
It wasn’t enough to play a good game on home ice. Every Avalanche error was sufficiently punished in Game 2.
“Itap a fine margin for error, the difference of winning and losing,” Bednar said. “There’s obviously things in the game, especially when you gave up two in the third period, that you don’t like.”
